The Dash Action

Image by Ubisoft [7 min read] One of the things I love about tabletop games, video games and fantasy is the feeling of being somewhere else. Sometimes that means another world entirely. Sometimes it means Middle-earth, Arrakis or the Forgotten Realms. But there is something particularly satisfying about stepping into a world that actually existed. Ancient Rome. Viking England. Medieval Europe. Feudal Japan. These weren't invented by a game designer. People actually lived there, fought there, travelled there and built things that we can still walk around today. And games give us a rather more interesting way of exploring that history than memorising dates at school. Assassin's Creed Greco-Roman Norse & Vikings Medieval Europe Feudal Japan Final Thoughts Assassin's Creed Assassin's Creed is a historical action-adventure video game series built around a fictional struggle between the Assassins and the Templars. I love ancient history, and Ass...

Image by AMC [7 min read] Science fiction often asks what happens when humanity gets more powerful. Post-apocalyptic stories ask what happens when we lose everything. No government. No electricity. No supermarkets. Sometimes not even enough people left to keep civilisation going. What I love about the genre is that the apocalypse itself is rarely the interesting part. It's what comes afterwards. The best post-apocalyptic worlds take away the systems we normally depend on and ask a much more uncomfortable question: what would we do without them? Would we cooperate? Fight? Rebuild? Take what we need? Try to impose our own rules? I've always been drawn to stories that explore those questions. Here are three of my favourites — and, as usual, a few ways you can get lost in them yourself. The Walking Dead I came to The Walking Dead as an adult, after the TV series launched in 2010. What hooked me wasn't really the zombies. In fact, one of the things I loved about the series was ...

Image courtesy of Board Game Quest [5 min read] A couple of months ago I wrote about finally getting War of the Ring to the table. At the time, I hadn't played another person. I'd played two solo games instead, making mistakes, correcting rules as I went, and gradually convincing myself that this famously intimidating game wasn't nearly as impossible as I'd imagined. One of the questions I left with was whether that solo learning would actually benefit my first contact with another player. Now I know the answer. Yes—but probably not for the reason I expected. The Solo Games Didn't Teach Me the Rules They gave me context. When my friend Mariano came over to play, we still spent around six hours on our first game together spread over two sessions. The setup was still long. We looked up plenty of rules. The opening turns were still slow. None of that surprised me. What surprised me was that I never felt lost. I'd already seen the systems working together. I knew w...

   Image by Modiphius [15 min read] One of the goals of The Dash Action is to make tabletop games easier to learn and easier to get to the table. Sometimes the best way to understand a system isn't another rules explanation—it's watching someone learn it. After around five hours with Fallout: Wasteland Wanderer , I've collected my first impressions alongside my complete play notes. You'll see the mistakes I made, the rules I misunderstood, the stories that emerged unexpectedly, and how the system feels in actual play. Initial Impressions The biggest strength of Wasteland Wanderer is the structure. It has a really clean solo gameplay loop: travel → encounter → take action, with a defined list of actions plus enough flexibility to improvise narratively when needed. Character creation is quick, the 5x5 map system is excellent, and gradually sketching out the wasteland as you explore feels very Fallout. It’s also much more streamlined than the full Fallout 2D20 RPG , whi...